Chapter 14

Concerning Revelations

Congratulations! You have cleared the Emberwood Trials Dungeon!

+50000 EXP (Based on performance)

+30 Gold

+ Tree of Renewal (Skill)

Level 78 Rothawk Guardian Trio (Boss) Killed!

+60000 EXP

Hidden Quest: Secret of the Emberwood Cleared!

+20 Gold

+ Rare Skill Popper (Random)

+ Poison Resistance Skill Level 20

Thank god that’s over. At least none of them died. With whatever is going on with my instincts I don’t know what I would have done, in my head I know that death right now is fine, but 19 years of no respawns is not something you shrug off so easily.

“Thanks, Dave, I was a bit out of it.”

Dave leads me to the pedestal, and we sit down with the girls. “So that sucked.” He said. “I see what you meant about stats exceeding skills Lazarus. I think I need to do a bit of solo adventuring to learn my skills inside and out.” He looks at his torn shield and battered armor. “I think I need some new gear too.”

Before I could reply Angel chimed in, “That sounds like a good idea, I just got a delightful boost in stats hun, and I really don’t know how to use them effectively. This really isn’t like your average game where your damage goes up with your numbers and nothing else changes. This little excursion highlighted some of the gaps in my build as well. I am rather underwhelming in single target situations, and I will have to learn to dodge by facing weaker foes on my own. I may have to supplement my curses with something as well.”

Kate seemed to agree. “As much as I want to keep adventuring with you guys, I think I need to focus on learning my priest skills and how to heal more. I also need to do some of that stat training Angel mentioned. Maybe we can help each other.”

I sigh, I was going to point out the same things. The brief bit of training really wasn’t enough for them, and Angel was still a noob for god’s sake. What was I thinking? Okay, I wasn’t thinking, I was so used to only being around the ultra-competent veterans that I thought the few days would be more than enough to train. These guys have potential, but there is a difference between potential and experience and I keep making these fucking mistakes. I would need to talk to Violet about this. As a Psychic she was the most familiar with the mind, she might have noticed some time travel effects I hadn’t now that I had mentioned keeping a lookout for them.

“We should harvest the wooden remains from the birds, you might be able to get a staff made from that Angel. Some of it could also be used in a new staff for you Kate, a standard but augmented mop isn’t going to cut it for much longer. Either you will need a fully specialized mop built or a regular staff. The mop aspect helps with your casting though, right? Finding a Soap mana focus would be hard, but you might be able to make one, it's up to you. With the levels we have gotten you should be able to evolve your classes, and what you pick is up to you.”

She made a motion to protest, but I cut her off. “No Kate, I am willing to teach you and give advice, but you alone get to decide your path. Let no one ever make that decision for you, I actually overstepped when I told you to take Class Act, and I apologize for that. I will still answer any questions you have, but this is something only you can decide. I know you have been focusing on your healing powers recently, but is that because you think we need a healer, or is it what you want? Think about it.”

I clapped my hands, “In the meantime, we should open the skill poppers, these things are fun.”

Skill Poppers gave you a random skill, it was sometimes influenced by your own history but not always. I have seen Priests get Hellbeast summoning skills and Mages get powerful Weapon Styles. The funniest was an old guildmate that got a Style called Fist of Romance that let him use romance novels as weapons and gave him some very lewd combat tactics. The funniest thing was that he was a twelve-foot-tall collection of vines and wood that had just accidentally gotten the skill Tentacle Mastery from his class. We gave him shit about that for years.

Poppers looked like party crackers that you would pull open and get a prize, but instead, you got a skill downloaded into you. They came in Trash, Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Mythic. A fairly common party game was getting a ton of trash-level skill poppers and comparing results. I had only seen two mythic ones in all my time adventuring and never gotten anything above Epic myself.

The skills people got could be somewhat useful, something that became a significant part of their combat style, or even something that spawned a whole new class or path for them to take. There was also the significantly rarer Class Popper, and there were only three known types, Common, Rare, and Epic. They unlocked a truly random class and were mostly useless. The one time I got an Epic one I unlocked an Angel race-exclusive class called Archon General of Heaven’s Light, a priest/caster class. As a Deathknight variant, it was completely useless to me since I had no skills in that direction. This happened often with all but the Common ranked Class Poppers.

The last Popper type had no ranks, the Blessing Popper was just fun. Get a random Blessing at level 1-5, and it could be anything. I saw Slug, Apricot, Ocean, Beetle, Icetooth Wyrm, Ghost, and Cookie to name a few. These were of middling rarity, about as common as a Rare Skill Popper.

I explained about Poppers to the others, leaving out my future reminiscences, and they got excited. Dave went first getting a skill called Astral Weapon that covered his weapon in a projection of astral magic that made it larger and let it ignore armor.

Next up was Angel, she pulled the popper open and glowed with a brief flash of silver before clutching her head. She got one of those skills that bestow knowledge, they can be painful if you aren’t used to it. Her skill was called Burden of Literacy and it granted her a rudimentary knowledge of runes as a side effect. The main part of the skill was a passive buff to all stats that grew the more languages you could read and the better versed in them you were. It seemed to add up to 20 stats per language and slightly increased the ease with which you learned new ones.

Kate got lucky. While Dave got a rare but generic warrior skill, and Angel got a skill that would help her in the long run but wasn’t tailored to her, Kate got one that fit her completely. Sorcerous Bubbles let her apply any enchantment, either runic or spell-based, that she was familiar with to bubbles she makes. She would now be able to treat her bubbles as objects for enchanting and be able to conjure them fully enchanted for an increased mana cost. She may not know anything about enchanting now but in the future, this could be extremely useful.

I got one that was both useful and worthless.

Gravburst

Use Ki to explode the gravity at a target location unleashing warped gravity fluctuations. Strength of effect is based on skill level and Will. Increased control over the warped gravity with a higher Gravity Affinity.

A gravity skill would be amazing if I wasn’t an elemental manipulator. Gravity is a very hard element to get an affinity for, making it very rare. It is also quite powerful. A gravity skill that relies on Will is odd and potentially the beginning of a very strong class line. It will be very painful not to be able to take advantage of it. I dumped seventeen free points into Will so the skill wouldn’t be totally useless and to give my Ki a boost.

The skill we all got was pretty nice.

Tree of Renewal

Like the mighty tree, you draw life from the ground. When out of combat your health recovers faster and status effects clear faster. If standing on earth or stone, you gain twice the effect and a boost to defense until you move. Strength of effect is based on Wis.

A decrease in recovery time is always welcome, and there are more skills out there like it, if you get enough recovery skills then they stack, and you decrease downtime massively. It might not be so important at this stage but it's damned useful a few years down the road.

Add that to the Poison Resistance and we actually made out pretty damn well from this place. If the others were ready for this level of dungeon it would have been great. As it was, we were damn lucky to make it out alive.

We gathered what we could and when we were ready to leave, we headed towards the door that we entered from. It had turned into a silver portal that would lead us out of the dungeon.

Before entering I looked back at the six pillars. The energy I could feel from them reminded me of something from a long time ago. I walked over to the nearest one and extended some mana, when it touched the pillar it recoiled and twisted, darkening with a strange taint. Fuck.

This was the phenomena found at the places tainted by the Shadow King. Maybe someone did find this dungeon last time after all. I concentrated more than half my mana into a seed of lava and shoved it into the Pillar. The Pillars screamed.

Their scream shook the walls. The gem in the ceiling fell. The six pillars flailed like those damn blow-up men outside a car dealer. Red and black symbols appeared on them and then they retreated into the ground.

Hidden Quest: Cleanse the Emberwood Completed!

+Blessing of the Forest 5

After collecting the gem that fell, we walked through the portal. We found ourselves in front of the tree.

I marked it with a stone ring on a thick branch to help identify it for the future and then we made our way out of the forest. Seeing the white marble walls of Cloudburn was a welcome sight. I got a basic map made so the trip wasn’t a waste, but it sure as hell was hard on my group.

Before we split up I used one of the spare slime cores Katenip had to make a communicator for AngelOfMusic. It took a bit of fiddling, but I was able to link it to our network. I was shamelessly ripping off the magitech from fifteen years in the future and doing a hack job of it too. I got Angel’s messenger ID and promised to add her to the chatroom in the real world. With that our party disbanded.

I stopped by the druid tree and left a note for Caelus telling him about the taint of the Shadow King. Then I logged out.

Taking the headset off I felt an odd spike of pain in my head. It hasn’t even been a week yet and mana is starting to leak through? The pain was from cutting off the tainted chunk of mana I had used to sense the Shadow King and obliterating it. It wasn’t a bad problem and would heal in a day but the fact that it carried over so much faster than last time is concerning.

I downloaded the footage of the dungeon to my computer and started running it through some editing software. With a few cuts and some background music, it looked pretty good and didn’t give out any information I wanted secret. I posted a clip of it under ‘Lazarus’ on a dozen sites with a link to my new streaming page where I put the whole video behind a paywall.

With that my new career as a streamer had begun.

I found Santa in the chatroom talking with Violet and asked them if they had noticed any odd mental effects from the time travel. With a bit of a description of my recent behavior, they agreed that something was up and started examining their own actions. Violet told us to wait and jumped into the game to use her powers to examine her mind.

While she was gone, I asked Santa how it had gone with his family. He told me they had both gotten class Act after following his instructions and using a pair of Communication Talismans he had ‘procured’ to ask him questions. Santa always was a man of many talents. The interesting thing was that the requirements listed for them had an additional clause, ‘have an overall level of 0’. What got really spooky is when Santa told me he would have qualified for this class last time, and that it didn’t exist. When we went back in time, something changed……Fuck.

Violet came back into the chatroom in the middle of my barrage of inventive curses. When we explained to her what we figured out she not only joined in but completely outdid me.

Her news wasn’t much better. With her powers, she had examined her mind and found an anomaly. Her mind was a smashed together blend of her younger and older minds. Retaining all the memories of the old one and much of the skills, but emotionally the two were blended in a strange way. Looking at her own actions Violet noted that she had been behaving as if she were her younger self but had read ahead in the book of time. She knew what to do, and when to do it, but the dissonance between the age of the minds that made her up made her make mistakes. Not only mistakes but she was having mood swings. Santa confessed he was having the same problems.

Violet had a theory as to why I hadn’t had the same symptoms as them. At this age, I had been depressed, angry, nearly suicidal even. When I wasn’t angry or sad I was numb. It was a bad time for me and Violet thought that let my older mind hold more sway, but it did make me do some stupid shit and emotionally embrace the game as an actual game. Since the mind was Violet’s specialty I was inclined to believe her diagnosis. Her hope was that as time went on our minds would merge and stabilize. Until then we would just have to watch ourselves and get companions that would help us.

I already had some companions and Santa would be talking to his family remotely until he got here, then we could keep an eye on each other. Violet would need to do something she hated, make a friend. As she so eloquently put it before signing off, “Not only were we kicked back in time, but our brains were blenderized, and all the goddamn furniture was rearranged behind our backs!”

I told Santa about the dungeon and he was worried but there wasn’t anything he could do at the moment; he was waiting for a group of nomadic Icefey to move on so he could continue his travels. He only probably had to wait a few hours but that meant he was out of game for the rest of the day.

We worked on my info packet and included a bit of advice to take all the class quests before picking a class. We also extolled the virtues of Free Points and explained Extra Stats.

The strangeness around Class Act made us wary of actually explaining it. Some classes you could only take if you didn’t know about them beforehand. While this didn’t seem like one of those, we weren’t taking chances. Of course, when someone got it they would post it and the cat would be out of the bag, but by that time a bunch of people would have gotten it and that would leave room for the world to see what it might evolve into. If it turned out to be a class that wouldn’t appear if you expected it, the person talking about it online wouldn’t be believed after a while and then people would get it again.

We were still hoping it was just a regular class type though. We liked to cling to our delusions.